Turnstyle on Thursday, Sep. 6th
A version of this story is also airing on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Youth Radio reporter Bianca Brooks is in Charlotte along with the Youth Radio election team.
Over the past few weeks, President Obama has been heavily courting the youth vote, visiting college campuses in swing states around the country. At the Democratic Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, there’s a big push for youth involvement. There are 644 delegates under the age of 35, and even an official youth engagement coordinator. Polls show young adult support for President Obama at around 55%, slightly down from when he was elected in 2008.
Read the whole story at the Youth Radio Convention 2012 blog.
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This story also aired on Marketplace.
On a mission to find the most lucrative jobs for young folks at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, I began awkwardly asking every young person I saw, “How much money are you making right now?” I found volunteers, making what volunteers make, nothing. I also found crossing guards making 18 dollars an hour. These were the kind of jobs you expect to find at a major political event like this: coordinators, greeters, and support staff.
Read the whole story at the Youth Radio Convention 2012 blog.
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One of a handful of parties during the Republican National Convention in Tampa’s neighboring city Ybor was hosted by the Rock The Vote campaign, so presumably, it was about politics. Headlining the show was electro house DJ/producer Steve Aoki. There was no doubt Aoki (whose name sits right under David Guetta on Forbes’ “Highest Paid DJs” list) could bring out young folks out in the masses. But for what exactly? Maybe I’m too square to get the point besides just another party.
Most of the crowd, outfitted in everything from go-go dancing outfits to glitter painted Steve Aoki t-shirts (not to mention rave gloves), definitely were not Republicans.
So maybe the plan was to get all the young ragers together and make them sit through a small lecture before partying. Inside the venue however, it looked like your normal club atmosphere. No register stations, no voting information — just drinks, loud music and party people. Rock the Vote and its sponsor Pringles did spring for 25 flat screens showing Rock the Vote and Pringles propaganda throughout the night. I started to womder if this event was connected to the RNC or even about voting at all.
Heather Smith, President of Rock the Vote, told us she’s positive that parties like this are making a difference in an unconventional way.
“You know, you can go to places where they’re hanging out, you can go online, do mobile programs, you can go to college campuses, but sometimes you need to get people together. That’s what we do with our concerts. We get to convey the message of civic engagement and to define what it means to participate. When there’s 2,000 people dancing for your right to vote, it’s quite contagious.”
The club filled out around nine o’clock and excitement built as Aoki took the stage. The crowd, elated that the stringy haired DJ has taken to the turntables, begins to chant “Aoki!.” A perfect moment for a speech. I mean, we are in the middle of the RNC, right? Aoki takes the microphone and says, “I’m doing this for free so ya’ll better go f***ing vote!”
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Turnstyle on Wednesday, Aug. 29th
A version of this story is also airing on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Youth Radio reporter Robyn Gee is in Tampa along with the YR and TurnstyleNews election team.
Paul Ryan was officially nominated yesterday as Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate. There’s a lot of excitement about the choice, some of it because of the hope that Ryan’s youthfulness can benefit the party’s image.
When you talk to young conservatives at the Republican National Convention in Tampa about their vice presidential candidate, they’re nothing short of dreamy-eyed. Ryan is about as close to a bona fide celebrity as the party’s got. What congressman wouldn’t welcome the comparisons we heard — to stars like Paul Rudd, Ryan Gosling, and Carson Daly?
Read the full version as part of Youth Radio’s Convention 2012 special coverage.
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Henry Havoc, a single parent from San Antonio, TX, is all about principles: “Sticking to a balanced budget, sticking to the truth, no unjust wars — that’s why I’m here.”
“Here,” is the Sun Dome at the University of South Florida in Tampa, waiting for Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to arrive to speak at a rally days before the RNC.
Havoc carries around an American flag with words Sharpied on top of the stars and stripes that read:
“My country is sick, we need a doctor for a president”
They’re lyrics from his song “My Country Is Sic,” which Havoc dedicated to Ron Paul.
Havoc says even if Ron Paul isn’t destined for the candidacy, he still plans to “vote Ron Paul.
Both (Obama and Romney) are supported by Goldman Sachs,” Havoc said. “They both want more wars. That’s not cool, man.”
Henry Havoc’s song is pretty cool. It’s got a Southern hip hop bounce, and lyrics that make Ron Paul sound like one of the characters in The Expendables.
Listen to it HERE.
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Robyn Gee on Friday, Jul. 20th
When I told Taylor Peck his election quiz website reminded me of a dating website, the political junkie and co-founder of www.isidewith.com said, “I’ll take that as a compliment — hopefully they’ve done as much work as we have to match you with someone else.” But instead of romantic partners, isidewith.com matches users with compatible political candidates.
Peck and co-founder Nick Boutelier created an online quiz that takes five minutes to complete, and after asking only 20 questions, spits out a “political profile” that tells you how well you match up with different political candidates. The site is quickly approaching one million quiz-takers, and averages over 100,000 unique views a day, since emerging from beta phase in April 2012.
(more…)
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Maya Cueva on Thursday, Jul. 12th
To hear the full interview with Professor Joe Kahne, click on the player above.
Youth might not be going to the polls in vast numbers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care about making change in their communities, and in the national issues that affect their lives. (more…)
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Call it the “Morgan Freeman” effect. Blame it on the “librul meedeeya”. Better still: blame it on silly marketing during an election year. A National Geographic Channel poll to drum up support for a new show has yielded some cosmic results.
A new poll, sponsored by the National Geographic Channel, shows that 65 percent of Americans believe that Obama would be better at fighting aliens than Mitt Romney. And since 36 percent of respondents believe in UFOs, this could actually help turn the election in Obama’s favor.
Thanks to io9 for brightening up my day.
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“If Citizens United was the Big Bang of a new era of money in politics, here’s the universe it formed: rapidly expanding super-PACs and nebulous 501(c) groups exerting gravitational pull on the 2012 election.”
Such is the legend above the “Interactive Map of the Dark-Money Universe” that left-leaning magazine Mother Jones unleashed on the world today. The work of writers and coders working for the magazine, the map acts as visual aid for understanding the influence that big money donors are able to wield in the current political climate. Where possible the team has provided the names of the donors. Yet as the map makes clear: sometimes that information is not forthcoming.
That’s only a partial screenshot above, and it’s totally inert. Head over to Mother Jones to check out the real thing and read up on their methodology.
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NPR on Tuesday, Mar. 27th
Photo Credit: hjl
Lester Wilson doesn’t think of himself as a Republican or a Democrat. He’s not a card-carrying Libertarian or Green, either.
The one group he does belong to is the 40 percent of Americans who identify as independents — a group now larger than any single political party, according to a recent Gallup survey.
“I like my independent status. I think voting for just one party is a betrayal of my civic duty,” says the 38-year-old maintenance worker from Asheville, N.C.
There’s a lot of talk this election cycle about how important independents will be in deciding the November presidential election and which candidate will win their votes.
‘Closet Partisans’
But exactly how independent are the self-styled independents?
Wilson, for example, has occasionally voted for Republicans on the local level, but he’s gone for the Democrat in all but one presidential election. The sole exception was 2004, when he says he voted Libertarian. He even went to the polls in his state’s 2008 Democratic presidential primary (and voted for Barack Obama).
He has a lot of company. Research over the years suggests that most independents are what John Petrocik, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, calls “closet partisans.”
“We talk as though these people are strongly susceptible to the short-term influences of campaigning and the economy, and that they are a massive swing bloc in the electorate,” says Petrocik, whose research helped lay the groundwork for the influential 1992 book The Myth of the Independent Voter.
“For the most part, none of those things are true,” he says.
Wilson, who sees his political autonomy as a civic duty, is an example of someone who has taken to heart the belief that, as Petrocik puts it, “a good citizen is independent-minded and makes up his or her own mind.”
“But as soon as you press them, they very quickly admit that they prefer one party or another,” he says.
Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta, agrees that being an independent is often an important part of a voter’s personal identity. “People want to think of themselves as independent, that they don’t just vote automatically,” he says.
He also thinks there may be a more pragmatic reason why some voters remain unaffiliated: “They don’t want to get literature; they don’t want to be bothered; they don’t want to get phone calls.”
Truly independent voters do exist, according to Abramowitz and Petrocik, but they account for just 10 percent to 15 percent of the electorate. “And once you take away those people who aren’t going to turn out, you’re down to something like 6 percent or 7 percent,” Abramowitz says.
In other words, the true swing voters are a pretty small group.
They also haven’t been the deciding factor in tight presidential elections that many people might think. In the three most closely contested races of the past 40 years — 1976, 2000 and 2004 — the majority of independents backed the candidate who wound up losing the popular vote. (In 2000, George W. Bush won the independent vote and the White House even though Al Gore won the popular vote by nearly 550,000 votes.)
Myth Of The ‘Myth’?
Abramowitz says exit poll data show independents who say they lean toward a particular party — and most of them lean Democratic — follow through in the voting booth.
In 2008, for example, exit polls showed that about 90 percent of those who said they leaned Democratic ended up voting for Barack Obama, while something like 80 percent of the Republican-leaning independents went for Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
But Todd Eberly, a political science professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, says you have to look at voters’ behavior over time, not just at exit poll data in a single election, to get a clear picture of how people really vote.
He says independents who say they lean toward a particular party — especially those who favor Democrats — are actually more likely to switch sides from one election to another.
“In any given election, yes, they do vote like people who say, ‘I’m a strong Republican’ or ‘I’m a strong Democrat,’ ” he says. “But if you follow them across time, they are less loyal to that party from election to election.
Eberly says this behavior accounts for the frequent power shifts in Congress.
“The fact that [independents] from one congressional cycle to the next will switch their support adds to the instability in politics right now, where one party cannot hold onto power for much more than one or two election cycles,” he says.
Out on the campaign trail, most political strategists have become true believers when it comes to the myth of the independent voter, Abramowitz says. Energizing the base, he says, is more important than attracting the independents — especially for those Republicans chasing their party’s nomination in August.
“It doesn’t mean you completely ignore those folks,” he says, “but they aren’t as important to the outcome.”
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